A typical data center may contain Information Technology (IT) equipments including servers, telecommunication equipments, networking equipments, switches and the like. The IT equipments may be arranged on racks or frames in the data center. The IT equipments may generate heat as a result of being utilized for processing of various actions and tasks. The heat generated by the IT components may therefore need to be compensated in order to avoid heating or generating a hot-spot in the data center. The IT equipments may be cooled using cooling units such as computer room air conditioners (CRAG) or computer room air handlers (CRAH), wherein each of these cooling units may be deployed in the data center. The CRAC may be at least one of a return-air controlled CRAC, supply controlled CRAC and the like. Further, the cooling of the IT equipments may also be achieved using advanced cooling units such as in-row coolers, rear door coolers, liquid cooled cabinets and chip cooling techniques.
Data centers consume huge amount of energy in operation. Hence, data center owner strives to reduce energy bills. Cooling units constitute to a major portion of this energy. The cooling of the data center by the computer room air conditioners (CRAC) or the computer room air handlers (CRAH) may depend on various factors associated with design and operational parameters of the data center. The heating conditions may be varied due to variance in the load conditions on the equipments in the data center. The variance in the heating conditions may therefore lead to control the air supply of the cooling units such that data center does not enter into the hot-spot state. However, since there are numerous challenges in identifying exact design and operational parameters variances leading to the hot-spot, the cooling units employed may not be adapted effectively in order to cool the data center. Therefore, the data center may either be over-cooled on under-cooled and hence the cooling efficiency of the data center may be affected. Therefore, the current data center centers may face a problem of optimum cooling and thereby leading to high cooling costs and wastage of energy resources.
There is always possibility of optimizing cooling efficiency by making large changes in cooling infrastructure. For example, optimizing layout of the data center, installing latest cooling units like rear-door heat exchangers may improve cooling efficiency substantially. But all these large changes require huge capital investment and also downtime. Moreover, data centers are allowed to have very little downtime. Hence, data center owner always looks for simpler and cheaper methods of improving cooling efficiency. One of the common methods is making small gradual changes in current cooling infrastructure but still gain significant savings in the operational costs.